Should We Try to Defeat Nature, and Win?

Submitted by admin on Sat, 2011-04-09 00:31

Edward Duca goes back in history to Chairman Mao’s China: a case study on humanity’s relentless drive to defeat nature

Many human ideologies
presume that we can manipulate nature without cataclysmic
consequences. Yet history begs that we try to live in harmony with
nature, and within our means, but who wants to live with this hippie
nonsense? Zero growth? Sustainability? Do these ideologies drive
nations? Let us cast back to the late 1950s– early 1960s China, to
the period in history when Mao Zedong’s war against nature and the
scientific establishment killed 36 million people.

At the start of the
1950s, China was bankrupt and shamed from successive onslaughts: the
colonial West had divvied up imperial China a century before; around
10–20 million Chinese had died at the hands of Japanese during
World War II; and afterwards, a brutal civil war left over three
million dead. In its wake, Chairman Mao Zedong and the Communist
Party reunified China, with an idealism that made China’s future
seem limitless. Their ideology convinced millions of Chinese to
emigrate back and rebuild their homeland. So how did this lead to the
greatest man-made famine ever seen?

China was industrialised
and modernised under Chairman Mao by campaigns such as ‘Let a
hundred flowers bloom’ to advance creative arts, and ‘Let
a hundred schools of thought contend’ promoting academic debate.
However, this renaissance of thought was cut brief as Mao’s reign
entered its sunset. His military ideology and extreme communist views
proved to be catastrophic. The Anti-Rightist Movement
(1957-1958), with the brief of denouncing capitalists, Malthusians
and the bourgeois, resulted in over half a million intellectuals
being publicly disparaged by students and peers, forced to
self-criticise, and either kept under house arrest or re-educated
through labour. Many committed suicide. China suffered one of the
greatest 'brain drains' in history in just two years.

Some historians think
that the Hundred Flowers Campaign was a lure to identify opposition
to Chairman Mao’s next grand plan: ‘The Great Leap Forward’,
1958-1961. This cynicism was not wholly unwarranted since Mao’s
thoughts in his ‘Little Red Book’ are strikingly similar
to one of the three pillars of Chinese thought: legalism. Legalism
was expounded by Qin Shi Huangdi (221-210BC), the
first man to unify China and who also burnt countless books, built
the Great Wall, and was buried with the Terracotta Army.
Legalism places the state above
individual needs. The ruler is also meant to be charismatic, his
thoughts mysterious, and most importantly, revered. Its philosophy
was one of dominance and submission.

The
Great Leap Forward brought a plethora of slogans meant to achieve
great social mobilisation to modernise China. ‘Mao Zedong thought’
held that socialism could reshape the material world by sheer
willpower. ‘The masses of China’ (over 600 million at this point
due to the overpopulating policy of Ren
Duo, Lilang Da, 'with many people,
strength is great') would unleash raw labour with the slogan Ren
Ding Sheng Tian,
'Man must conquer nature'.

The
campaign Chu Si Hai,
‘Wipe out the four pests’, started on May 18, 1958, with the
declaration by Chairman Mao, “The whole people, including five-year
old children, must be mobilised to eliminate the four pests.” The
four pests were rats, sparrows, flies and mosquitoes. Sparrows were
thought to eat grain, so a synchronized tujizhan,
'shock attack', was launched with people banging gongs, using ladders
to knock them out of nests, breaking their eggs or simply whacking
them with a stick. By 1959 sparrows were not found in local markets,
whilst more insects, which the sparrows ate, resulted in more grain
infestations. Chu Si Hai
is still used to this day (thankfully cockroaches have
replaced sparrows).

In August 1958, a few
months after the four pests campaign, Mao declared that within 15
years China’s steel production wouldsurpass that of the UK.
To achieve this aim, 100 million people, or one in six Chinese, were
prevented from farming and made to smelt iron and steel. Useful pots,
pans, farming equipment and any other iron objects or materials wereused to try and achieve this quota providing raw material to
manufacture masses of identical items. Adults and children alike
smelted iron day and night in backyard furnaces, but these furnaces
were not hot enough to produce high quality steel. Although steel
production doubled within a year, half of that was of unusable
quality. When coal was unavailable, the furnaces burnt wood. In
Yunnan province alone, this resulted in the loss of 30,000–40,000
square kilometres of forest cover. This was greater than the amount
of forest cleared, within a comparable amount of time, in the
whole of the Amazon.

China had silenced its
own intellectuals, but revered Soviet ideology. The Soviet biologist
Trofim Lysenko—a Lamarckist who caused the death of numerous
scientists—forced socialist ideas on biology, ideas that became
sacrosanct in China. Lysenko emphasised deep ploughing, up to
10 feet deep, and close planting. In China, close planting was taken
to an extreme when up to 5000 cotton, 20,000 sweet potato or 12,000
corn seeds were sowed per sixth of an acre. Such practices lead to
widespread decay of plants and subsequent infertility of the soil.
Infamously, pictures of plump children sitting on rice plants were
used as ‘poster boys’ by officials to claim that one sixth of an
acre could produce 27.8 tonnes of rice. These children were later
revealed to have been sitting on a bench. Such fabrications were
performed to outcompete other officials, to please Chairman Mao, and
to avoid persecution. Distorting facts had become common practice.

Some Chinese
intellectuals bravely chose to oppose each one of Chairman Mao’s
campaigns. Professor Hou Guangjun increased agricultural yield
through ziran miangeng, no-till agriculture. However, every
time there was a rebellious act, Mao’s anti-science stance silenced
them. Such stringent policies resulted in people being pulled off
collective farms to forge inferior iron. The farmers who
remained had to use ineffective ploughing techniques that led to
infertile farmland. The nail in the coffin was that harvested grain
became infested. Hindsight makes the world’s greatest famine, with
deaths estimated at 36 million,seem so easily avoidable.

The famine was one of the
greatest human catastrophes in history. Yet, it did not change Mao’s
stance of ‘War Against Nature’. It intensified it. In the 1960s
and 1970s, Mao coerced the Chinese to attack nature in the campaigns
huilin kaihuang, 'Destroy the forests, open the wastelands’;
weihu zaotian,
‘Encircle lakes, create farmlands’; and zhisha
zaotian, ‘Manage the sand and create
farmland’. Even
mountains could be tamed: cong shitou
fengli ji di, xiang shitou yao liang,
‘Squeeze land from rock peaks, get grain from rocks’. These ideas
caused widespread and irreparable destruction of the
environment. Inner Mongolia lost three million acres of land due to
these efforts. Hubei, known as the land of a thousand lakes, lost
over half of them. Shanxi, whose forests covered 60 percent of the
province, lost most of them. The examples that could be cited are
endless, highlighting the extreme attitude of Maoist China.

Since then, the situation
in China has changed; it is currently the largest investor in green
technology. However, it also happens to be the largest emitter of
carbon dioxide, has hundreds of so-called 'cancer villages', and the
largest number of polluted cities worldwide. China’s future is
bright, but faces many challenges. What does all this mean for
nature?

China
has three pillars of thought. Mao is linked with extreme legalist
ideas. The
current government, whilst still evoking the legalists, also has a
strong dose of Confucianism, as
evidenced bythe
numerous government-funded Confucius centres found globally.
Confucianism unfortunately promotes a patriarchal society. Yet it
holds education, self-improvement, and a strict moral code as its
shining light. Its view on nature is highly condescending,
accentuating how the ruler needs to take care of the environment
since it is very useful to mankind, and in China’s case, to
maintain natural ingredients for traditional Chinese medicine.

The
current Chinese government’s treatment of nature seems highly in
linewith
this practical human-first ideology. However, there is a third pillar
of Chinese thought, Daoism. Daoism describes harmony among man,
society and nature. Humans and nature are linked, therefore, it is
wrong to exploit nature to satisfy oneself, and everything has to be
done in deference to natural laws. This was taken to an extreme, and
even harming a blade of grass was considered a grave offence. Yet,
Daoism wasn’t always impractical. For example, there were clear
prohibitions against hunting animals that were rearing their young.

A
modern and less extreme reinterpretation of Daoism could lead to
ideas of recycling, zero-growth, no-till and organic farming.
Humanity would seek not to over-exploit and plunder nature’s
riches, but to work with nature. Conversely, capitalism, the world’s
current ideology, emphasises that economies must be in constant
growth, relentlessly exploiting the environment. This is the essence
of the consumption-oriented society we all live in today. It is
impossible for the world to sustain this status
quo. Economic growth cannot occur at
the expense of the environment indefinitely.

The World
Wildlife Fund has just released a report showing that prior to 2007,
the world was consuming 1.5 Earths worth of resources every year. At
this rate, oil will run out, as will rare metals, whilst population
growth remains exponential. Economically this is also detrimental.
“Scarcity of resources and degraded natural systems will increase
the price of food, raw materials and other commodities,” says David
Nussbaum of WWF-UK. Even politics cannot escape the changing
environment. A few days after the New Year was celebrated, riots in
Tunisia sparked by increases in the price of food led to governmental
collapse. When people’s basic needs are not met, unrest follows.

It is
unfathomable to think that the world can support today’s rate of
exploitation endlessly. A more
Daoist mentality to life might help some countries change this
unsustainable mentality. In my version of Utopia, greater scientific
knowledge and technological advances would be used to maintain
current yields, and a reasonable quality of life with less
exploitation. Yet, I still have a question that keeps nagging
me: how do you create sustainable economies that are prosperous, but
do not need constant exploitative growth?